MYTHCOMICS: ["ON THAT DAY, I MET SENPAI"], PLEASE DON'T BULLY ME, NAGATORO, PTS. 140-144 (2023)

 One compensation for the conclusion of the NAGATORO manga is that as a critic I can now view it as a finished work. Had I never seen the ending for any reason, I believe my determination in this essay-- that the manga is principally governed by the dramatic potentiality-- would still have been valid. But viewing the actual conclusion gives me the opportunity to reinforce that opinion.

My title for the essay, SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH, held a touch of irony, since I argued that the particular set of NAGATORO melodramas I had analyzed did not have the "long range" symbolic qualities that I seek in pinpointing literary myths.

Thus, when I search for a psychological myth, I look for an elaboration of symbolic resonances into mythopoeic concrescence, which is only possible when the author is a "long-range" mode. A dramatic concrescence can be formed from any number of "short-range" emotional states, but that concrescence does not depend on any abstractions as does the mythopoeic type. 

And now that I've seen the whole design of the series, aside from a forthcoming epilogue, I can assert that all of the NAGATORO stories I've looked at so far are at best "near-myths." Only in one section, about ten installments from the end of the main narrative, does author Nanashi develop his characters into deeper symbolic presences. But the symbolism does not involve the Buberian arguments I invoked in my last two essays, but an opposition that arguably is more central to Japanese culture: the conflict between instinctual existence and a disciplined, reasoned outlook.

For almost eighty installments, Nanashi keeps the reader in the viewpoint of the male protagonist Naoto, a.k.a. "Senpai." There are two or three exceptions where the viewpoint is Nagatoro's-- she has a nightmare, she talks with her sister-- but the reader is never privy to Nagatoro's thoughts, while Naoto's thoughts are ever-present. As Naoto is drawn out of his protective shell by his "kohai's" teasing and demands for attention, he becomes more interested in learning more about her life apart from him. After Part 80, Nanashi begins developing parallel plotlines for the two protagonists with respect to the avocations they have pursued: Naoto with respect to becoming a better artist, and Nagatoro's with respect to mastering the sport of judo. Both avocations will become pathways to general career goals, as indicated by the final episode. But the paths followed also indicate the process by which each protagonist has assimilated aspects of the other's "strong points," with the tightly wound Naoto becoming more open to following his instincts, while Nagatoro becomes more focused, more disciplined.

Episode 140, the one from which I take my umbrella-title, is the first one to delve into Nagatoro's thoughts. Previous episodes have revealed to Naoto that though Nagatoro had been practicing judo since elementary school, she abandoned the hobby after suffering a humiliating defeat at the end of her last middle-school year. Up to that point, Nagatoro's judo depended on her innate abilities-- her superlative speed and her instinctive mastery of techniques. But a rival, one Orihara, was so frustrated by Nagatoro's superiority that she trained until she reached Olympic levels of accomplishment, and so handed Nagatoro her first real defeat.

During Nagatoro's first year at high school, she and her friends accidentally encounter Naoto, and get a look at the fantasy-manga he draws. In the first episode, the reader has no idea why Nagatoro chooses to bully Naoto far more than her friends, though it's soon evident that it's wrapped up in a physical attraction that she won't admit to others and barely admits to herself. According to her mental dialogue, her judgment of her senpai's art is ruthless, calling it "awkward" and "delusional." Yet at the same time, she senses that "he tried his best," and that appeals to her on some level-- an instinctual one, since Nagatoro, though she reads manga, does not have any interest in art as such.

There is, without doubt, a classic bullying-angle to her aggression: because of a failure in her own life, Nagatoro is moved to humiliate someone weaker than herself. But because Naoto becomes solicitous about her having abandoned her passion for judo, she forces herself back into the fray. In fact, Nagatoro's meditations on the past take place in the middle of a climactic battle with her rival Orihara at a school-sponsored judo tournament, with Naoto cheering her on. 

Nagatoro wins her match with Orihara. Yet while Naoto is glad for his almost-girlfriend, he feels that she's assumed a dominant role in their relationship once more. Amusingly, he imagines her as a malicious horned oni-demon, complete with an iron club and a tiger-skin bikini (which sounds more like Lum of URUSEI YATSURA than any traditional Japanese folk-myth.) And though in reality she presents no physical danger to Naoto, his fears are justified by the fact that she still loves to harangue him, presumably as a cover for her own feelings. Not surprisingly, Naoto flashes back to his first encounters with his kohai, when she attacked him with demonic sadism.

Thus, when the young fellow overcomes his trepidations in order to confess his feelings, he becomes far more outspoken than ever before, admitting that his first encounter with her was like a meeting with a wild beast. This doesn't exactly please a cute high school girl, and she retaliates that she thought of him as a "really really gross wharf roach." Yet Naoto simply rolls with the insult, admitting that her bestial attack served the purpose of dragging him out of "the shadows" and into "sunlight." 

Then, once Nagatoro works through all of her protests about Senpai's "grossness," she's finally able to admit that when they met, she was just as purposeless and adrift as he was, once she surrendered her passion for judo.

And so the young lovers reach a rapprochement as they finally become a couple, though once again, Nanashi reminds his readers that even if Nagatoro doesn't wield an iron club, she still has a lot of "the oni" in her.

After I selected this section of NAGATORO as the serial's only concrescent myth-discourse, I did a little research and learned that when Nanashi created his prototypical version of the series, in the form of a five-part webcomic, he ended that comic on a scene parallel to this one, with the Naoto-prototype confessing to the Nagatoro-prototype. I have not read the webcomic and from what summaries I've seen, it didn't go into a lot of character depth but rather portrayed its Nagatoro as a thoroughgoing sadist. This might make for an interesting comparison somewhere down the line, but as far as the series proper is concerned, the protagonists' struggle between the instinctive life and the life of premeditation remains the "master trope" of the narrative as a whole.

I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 2

 By the time of installments 22 and 23-- which I'll give the collective title of "Senpai, Let's Go to the Beach"-- the Naoto-Nagatoro relationship has settled into a rough routine. Naoto tries to remain aloof, and Nagatoro tries to pull him out of his shell. In this project she receives some ambivalent help from her girl-buddies Gamo and Yoshi, who also find Naoto amusing, though they're also entertained by Nagatoro's increasingly evident affection for her "victim."

So the foursome's trek to the beach to escape summer heat begins with the three girls mocking Naoto as usual. 

But being at the beach also highlights some sexual aspects overshadowed at high school, which involve Nagatoro seeking to get her share of "the male gaze" from Naoto.

Despite this exposure to nubile female flesh, Naoto refuses to gambol in the waves with the girls, remaining on shore. However, after a while Nagatoro can't resist ringing his chimes again. And in truth, Naoto hasn't totally distanced himself from the possibility of innocent fun, for Nagatoro soon learns that he's wearing swim trunks despite having claimed no desire to go swimming. 

Up to this point, despite having teased Naoto as an "it" (specifically, a sea louse), she's clearly trying to relate to him as a "thou" (a fellow being who needs to get out of his own way). But Naoto still plays hard to get. Nagatoro wants to apply sunscreen to his pale skin so he'll have no excuse to stay on the beach, and Naoto comes up with the excuse that only "lovers" rub lotion on each other's bodies.

This results in an extraordinary sequence. Since Naoto rejects her "thou" offer, Nagatoro rather easily slips back into "it" mode. Since the young student claims that he doesn't want to get lotion administered via her hands, she squirts some on him and then begins rubbing it in with her foot. Author Nanashi does not stint on showing that Nagatoro is clearly stimulated by making Naoto her footstool, and he doesn't show any desire to resist her rough ministrations. However, when her two friends try to join in, rationality asserts itself, and she tries to make them desist. 

Despite this display of teenage hormones, Naoto is fully slicked down with SPF, and he allows himself to join the girls at their seaside games. And the episode ends with Naoto admitting to himself that he enjoyed the idyll at the beach, even with all the teasing involved. With episode 24, Naoto will begin thinking that he shouldn't let Nagatoro take the initiative in their strange relationship all the time-- which becomes an important trope for the remainder of the series.

I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 1

I AND THOU, first published in 1923 (though it became a college favorite in the 1960s), was written by a philosopher who had renounced the practice of the Rabbinic tradition but nevertheless incorporated that tradition into his philosophy.  I AND THOU, rather than offering a series of reasoned arguments, puts forth a concatenation of incantatory meditations, centered upon Buber’s two schemas of human relationship: the “I-thou” and the “I-it”... Buber calls his two schemas “word pairs.”  By this he meant that even though he was well aware that all three words—“I,” “thou,” and “it”—were independent words, he believed that in terms of human relation it was impossible that any “I” could exist apart from its relationship to other phenomena.  Only two relationships were conceivable to Buber: either one's "I" related to a "thou" or an "it."   Thus he regards his two schemas as “word pairs” that are existentially insoluble. -- PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION.

I should get some sort of points for originality, for I hypothesize that I'm the only NAGATORO fan who would seek to gloss the appeal of a 21st century Japanese teen humor comic by referencing a 1920s Jewish philosopher. Yet for me, the key to NAGATORO's uniqueness lies in the process by which the character of Naoto, or "Senpai," goes from being an "it" to a "thou" in the eyes of the titular girl-bully.

For many if not all translations, the full title of the manga is PLEASE DON'T BULLY ME, NAGATORO, and I strongly suspect that the commercial translation ditched the word "bully" lest anyone think that the publishers were advocating the practice of bullying, particularly in the context of high-school student interaction. Yet understanding the dynamic of bully and victim is important to seeing how the relationship of the two main characters evolves.

In the first installment of the series proper, the reader knows little about either Naoto or Nagatoro except that he's a bookish-looking second-year high schooler, while she is a mischievous first-year student who's seen doing one athletic feat, doing a kung-fu high kick. But despite being younger than Naoto, Nagatoro instantly assumes a dominant attitude. Not for over a hundred episodes will readers learn what caused Nagatoro to pick on Naoto, whose name she never uses in the entirety of the series. But in the first episodes, the reader is given to understand that "Senpai" is an "it" to the young girl, a subject for inordinate mockery. 

Not much changes in the second installment. Nagatoro, having tormented Naoto so much that he breaks down in tears for the first time in his experience, beards him in the young fellow's lair: a school "art club" of which Naoto is the only active member. On the pretext of apologizing for the previous day, Nagatoro insists on providing the artist with a model, though he expresses no desire for one. Because Naoto has been so cut off from interactions with his peers, he can't draw an attractive female sitting right in front of him, and so she mocks his lack of sexual experience (though technically Nagatoro is no more experienced; she just talks a good game). Naoto breaks up again, and to add to his humiliation, he can't even shield his face because she's able to pry his arms apart.

The third installment, however, shows the first movement away from Nagatoro being in an "I-it" relationship with Naoto. A genuine bully is only too happy to continue treating his or her victim as a thing to suffer torment, and jock-bullies are notorious for believing that it's their privilege to dominate those who are weaker. Nagatoro's jock-credentials will be more firmly established in later stories, but after her third foray against Naoto's ego, she's genuinely surprised that he refuses to get angry at her taunts.

Up to this point, the reader also doesn't know why the young artist is so reserved. He then mentally reflects on all the bullies he's known before, and on how he simply kept his head down and refused to interact. In a sense, all previous bullies were also "its" to Naoto, as signified by the fact that he doesn't even recall the faces of his foes. However, he isn't able to distance himself from Nagatoro-- and because he's too reserved to even show obvious sexual stimulation, my conclusion is that he's fascinated by her being in most ways his utter opposite: extroverted where he's introverted, rash where he's hesitant. (One of his more significant observations later in the series is telling his girl-bully, "Everything's like a dare to you.")

In the rom-com genre there are countless stories in which two people start off in an acrimonious relationship ("I-it") and quickly progress to a mutually supportive one ("I-thou"). There are a smaller number of rom-coms in which it's a given that the contrary natures of the romantic pair will result in continuous off-and-on fights. But something about artist Nanashi's approach seems to suggest an attitude that I think compares with Buber's: the sense that both the "it" impulse and the "thou" impulse are integral to human beings generally, and remain so even when true romance blooms-- as I'll show with one more example from the early years of the series.

 

THE END OF NAGATORO

 

Since I don't follow any manga forums, I had no idea that this popular manga -- usually rendered in English as DON'T TOY WITH ME, MISS NAGATORO-- would have its conclusion published in Japan this June. Thus, the final episode, #154, was translated into English online this week in July.

Now, though I didn't know specific end-times, I was fully aware that the series would conclude soon. In many teen humor serials, the characters never age and never leave high school, ranging from ARCHIE to URUSEI YATSURA. But from the first stories, NAGATORO's author Nanshi hinted that his story would be time-centric. The male lead Naoto is introduced to the reader as a second-year in high school, while the titular Nagatoro is his junior by one year. She seemingly fixates on Naoto the first time she meets him, sarcastically using the respectful term "Senpai" toward him while in actuality she shows him no respect, at least in the earliest stories. Though I don't recall that Nanashi specifies the passage of time, once the series passed its hundredth installment it was clear that Naoto was going to graduate, for he was began studying to pass the mock exams for college. This factor became an impetus for the Naoto-Nagatoro romance, since once Naoto graduated, he would no longer see Nagatoro every school day. Nanashi set the reader up for the expectation that all the high school hijinks would have to come to an end as the protagonists left high school and began entering the world of adult work.

Nanashi made the transition just as entertaining as any of the early craziness, with lots of humor and heartache, but I puzzled over how he would wrap things up. Even in the later chapters, he introduced a handful of interesting characters, and suggested the evolution of possible subplots, such as:

(1) Is Gamo-chan really crushing on Nagatoro's older brother Taiga, and will anything come up of that possible affection?

(2) Following Nagatoro showing her commitment by being a nude model for Naoto, a teacher suggests that it would be viewed as a crime for an underage girl to expose herself that way, even for art. Would there be complications because of the romantic commitment between the two?

But no, Nanashi tamped down on further chaos in the end. When he introduced a subplot about both Naoto and Nagatoro volunteering to give year-end speeches for their respective classes, I thought that was just a minor fillip. Instead, Nanashi used the speeches as a means of describing how the two protagonists would continue their real-world aspirations, even while presumably maintaining their long-term romance until both are old enough to marry.

So the speeches they both give are descriptive of their experiences with one another, though worded as if they were more generalized descriptions of school life.

First, Nagatoro:

And then Naoto:

These are, as I said, very restrained for the NAGATORO series, and I don't know how I feel about the conclusion, even after having heard through one source that there may be an epilogue. However, the final chapter should make it possible for me to finally organize some of my thoughts on the series as a whole for a forthcoming essay. In that essay, I plan to discuss reasons why this simple-seeming teen romance comic should grab me so strongly-- much more so, I believe, than others I've celebrated here, such as NISEKOI and LOVE HINA.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS" (1930/1931)

 

Now this is more like it; cosmic horror the way HPL fans like it!

WHISPERER is one of the first six HPL stories I encountered in a particular collection back in The Day, and as I noted in my previous essay it eschews the dodgy dialect of HPL's immediately previous Mythos-tale DUNWICH HORROR. I'll note briefly that this time the reader also doesn't know the significance of the novella's title until the very end of the story. 

WHISPERER also resembles THE COLOUR OUF OF SPACE because it shows HPL's skill at describing the natural backdrops of the story, which in this case are the desolate woodlands of Vermont. The flooding of a local river causes the local townsfolk to circulate rumors about the corpses of mysterious beings in the waters. Albert Wilmarth, a literature teacher at Miskatonic University in Arkham, launches an amateur investigation of the rumors, writing newspaper articles on the local mythology of the aboriginal Indians. These essays cause a local farmer, Henry Akeley, to contact Wilmarth about his own experiences.

Though most of the exchanges between Wilmarth and Akeley are in the form of letters, this epistolary method of storytelling never sacrifices any tension. Akeley tells Wilmarth that for months his secluded farm has been besieged by mysterious beings which, when glimpsed at all, look like winged, claw-handed humanoids. The two humans eventually learn that these beings, "the Outer Ones," are visitors from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto), and they've set up a clandestine mining-operation in the vicinity of Akeley's farm. Only Akeley's supply of guns and guard-dogs has preserved him from being killed or abducted by these alien intruders. Eventually Wilmarth hears enough to convince him of the farmer's veracity, but by the time he physically arrives at the farm, he encounters what he thinks is Akeley, but is in truth "the whisperer in darkness."

Before I began this review-project, I mentioned here that I wondered if any of HPL's Mythos stories registered as crossovers. After all, the cosmic horror of WHISPERER is enhanced by two major sequences in which the human protagonists are exposed to an overwhelming variety of references to dozens of alien beings, domains, and deities, some original with HPL, some invented by authors with whom the writer was friendly, like Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Smith had apparently shown HPL his story "The Story of Satamptra Zeros," because that tale, which was the debut of Smith's toadlike god Tsatthoggua, didn't see print until after WHISPERER did.) 

All these arcane references built up HPL's vision of a bizarre universe beyond the ken of human reason-- but references, in my system, count only as "null-crossovers." However, though the main monsters of WHISPERER are the Outer Ones-- who had previously appeared in an HPL poem, "Fungi from Yuggoth"-- they do apparently enlist one of the "Great Old Ones" to deceive Wilmarth. HPL subtly mentions that the "mighty messenger" Nyarlathotep-- who was the narrative focus of a 1920 tale-- "shall put on the semblance of men." And this imposture proves necessary because, unlike the Outer Ones with their wings and claws, Nyarlathotep has already been established as being able to pass for human. So, in addition to THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. WHISPERER is a bonafide crossover story.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE DUNWICH HORROR" (1928/1929)

 Though I respect THE DUNWICH HORROR as a major Lovecraft work, I've never liked the story that much, and my re-reading of an annotated version didn't make that much difference. At most, the annotations made clear how much HPL was indebted to the Judeo-Christian mythology of angels mating with mortals-- which myth-trope was of course also derived from stories of pagan deities begetting demigods on humans. For instance, Klinger notes that one of the angel-references mentioned by HPL was to "Azazel," an angel with that precise reputation.

The opening of DUNWICH provides some strong description of the Massachusetts town of Dunwich, and of its multitudinous associations with the New England witch-trials and with the older pagan traditions of the Amerindians. In addition, HPL dumps on almost the entirety of the rural population of the area, expanding on his disgust for Joe Slater in 1919's BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP. I was rather surprised, for two reasons, to read a line in which the writer tore down these "white trash" for their history of "half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity." On one level I found this odd because subjects of murder and incest were the common coin of the Gothic fiction that HPL thoroughly lambasted in his overview of horror fiction, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE. On a second level, it's weird to hear DUNWICH associated with "incest," because it's about a mortal woman who has sex with an extradimensional creature-- which is about as "out-cest" as one can get. I can only conclude that HPL wasn't above associating one form of abominable sexuality with another, even though the fantasy of demon-coitus has nothing to do with familial interbreeding.

I also didn't like HPL's buildup to his big reveal. For most of the story, the author keeps the focus on the repulsive figure of Wilbur Whatley, the offspring of Lavinia Whatley and the demon-god Yog-Sothoth (making his debut as a "featured Old One.") While keeping the reader busy with Wilbur's peregrinations-- which are focused on obtaining information on occult rituals in order to unleash his demonic father on Earth-- HPL throws in a secondary mystery, about Wilbur's earthly father building a huge extra room atop the Whatley farmhouse and buying cattle that no neighbor ever sees again. Wilbur is slain at one point, and his half-alien body is revealed to onlookers. The big reveal, though, is that Lavinia Whatley also spawned a second son, a huge amorphous thing that occupied the extra room, with only tangential humanity, and this offspring is also killed when a Miskatonic U scholar, Doctor Armitage, is able to defeat the ritual and banish Yog-Sothoth.

Another problem with the story is that HPL is pretty bad with both his rural characters and their dialect. He kept dialogue to a minimum in THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. But in DUNWICH, there's a lot of farmer-talk, and it's excruciating. Fortunately, in the next Mythos story HPL eschewed almost all dialogue in yet another of his ventures into rural New England, and the results were far better. 

I note in passing that as far as I recall, the 1970 cinematic adaptation doesn't show Wilbur as being having a repugnant alien physiology that he hides from other humans, and the ending of the film is stronger for not "giving away the game" too early.

MYTHCOMICS: "TRIUMPH OF THE TORNADO TYRANT" (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #17, 1963)

This Gardner Fox JLA tale, while not as well-thought-out as the classic "Justice League's Impossible Adventure," nevertheless possesses a good myth-discourse which upgrades the standard "problem" of heroes overcoming villains to a "conundrum" about how that scenario can be validated.

The first page of the narrative proper begins with the heroes of the JLA celebrating their triumph over some stony-faced aliens. Batman opines that evildoers ought to realize that they have no chance against the forces of justice. J'onn J'onzz counters by saying that it's because such menaces exist that "they make us heroes." Just then, all of the heroes' bodies dissolve. An attack by one of those menaces?

No, all the heroes seen here are proxies for an alien being, the Tornado Champion-- who in some ways is using the Justice League of his comic-book universe much as the readers of the title do: to celebrate the virtues of goodness. The Champion had one exploit as "The Tornado Tyrant," menacing the planet Rann until being defeated by Adam Strange (also written by Fox in MYSTERY IN SPACE #61). He comes to admire the Justice League so much that he wants to emulate them exactly, and so he creates an exact duplicate of Planet Earth, except that he himself embodies the Justice Leaguers so that he can experience the inevitable triumph of good over evil.

However, Tornado-Fanboy doesn't overcome the evil in his own nature quite that easily. From "the ocean depths" (or maybe from the collective subconscious of the tornado-species), a duplicate Tornado-Being manifests, and this new Tyrant masters all of the Champion's ersatz Leaguers, mostly by either undermining their powers or turning them against one another. But before the Tyrant can eradicate the heroes, the Champion re-absorbs its component parts (using a "tornado-ship" like the one seen in the ADAM STRANGE story). He then decides that the only way he can formulate a counter strategy is by traveling to Earth to find out how the real heroes would cope. This means that he must, in essence, take the part of his villainous self, splitting off a part of his Champion-self to create a phony Tornado Tyrant to bedevil the real heroes.

Now, simplistic though all these complications may sound, Fox set himself a conundrum: to come up with a rationale as to WHY good should always be able to conquer evil. Six years later, a STAR TREK episode, "The Savage Curtain," tries to do something similar, though the conundrum there was to explain the difference between good and evil to an alien being. But how does one provide an answer for a foregone conclusion dictated by nothing but a literary trope?

And Fox's answer to his own conundrum-- is continuity.

So the Real Leaguers are defeated by the Fake Tyrant, just as the Fake heroes were defeated by the Real Tyrant. But unlike the imitation heroes, who only enjoy the simulacra of real lives, the real crusaders have gained a wealth of experience contending with menaces-- rather than, say, conjuring up faux enemies that can be vanquished easily. 

Thus, while the heroes collect their thoughts, they apply a certain amount of ratiocinative deduction. They debate as to whether the Tyrant's proxies might have been seeking to eradicate centers of atomic power to cover some vulnerability, but then dismiss the idea as untenable. However, the reason Author Fox included that blind alley-clue was to lead the heroes to a correct conclusion, even though only the real-world readers know why it's correct. The Tornado Being is not created by radiation, but it does have a dual personality-- and Green Lantern, drawing on one of his previous adventures (actually written by Fox's colleague John Broome), chooses to use "anti-energy" on the Tyrant as he did on a previous enemy that was a split-personality resulting from an atomic mishap. This strategy works for the Earth-heroes and destroys the Fake Tyrant. Yet the same process can't work for the observing Tornado Champion. If he tries to create anti-energy to destroy his evil self, he'll destroy himself as well.

But the Champion still prevails, by using another form of continuity. Since his proxies can't create anti-energy, they transport the Real Tyrant into the universe from which anti-energy came: "the anti-matter universe"-- which I assume is also a bit of continuity Fox also derived from Broome's GREEN LANTERN, though Fox doesn't explicitly reference Broome's "world of Qward."

If this was Fox's intention-- omitted to save space or reduce confusion in his young audience-- this would be doubly impressive, because in Broome the anti-matter world is also one dominated by evil-- and thus sending the Tyrant there is like consigning the "devil" in one's own nature back to perdition. 

I should note that in his Silver Age career Fox showed a penchant for stories in which he presented secondary scenarios in which characters "re-wrote" whatever initial scenarios Fox placed them in. I see this penchant as contributory to the way this Fox story solves the conundrum of "how can good always conquer evil:" by recognizing that this question itself is a literary trope, and that it can only be "solved" by invoking other tropes.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

While I guess I could follow up my meditations on the phase shifts of Lois Lane with an essay on, say, Jimmy Olsen, I'll take a 180-degree turn here (however brief) into a similar dynamic I found in a pop-fiction take on a venerable myth from the Hebrew Old Testament.

I won't go into the plot of the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA, since I adequately summarized the movie in my review. What makes it relevant to the phase shift I described is that the original texts from the Old Testament, principally "Kings," Solomon is the Prime while the Queen of Sheba-- later given the proper name "Balkis" by Islamic commentary-- is a Sub. So is Rehoboam, son of Solomon. But in the 1952 movie, both of them are Primes, while Solomon becomes a Sub who barely impacts the narrative. But there is no crossover-vibe at all in the movie. Even though Balkis and Rehoboam have absolutely no interaction in the Old Testament, they are both aligned to the "Solomon cosmos." Thus, when the movie centers upon these two characters and relegates Solomon to Sub status, the phase shift involved follows the same pattern as Lois Lane assuming Prime status and demoting Superman.

In contrast, the 2004 film NOAH is a valid crossover of two disparate figures in the Old Testament. There are no associations there between Noah and Tubal-Cain in scripture, except in the generic sense that both are incredibly long-lived figures. For that reason, the movie supposes that Tubal-Cain slew Noah's father Lamech, despite the fact that scripture does not reference Lamech's death in any way. Since Tubal-Cain does not sustain his own narrative, I suppose I would deem him a Sub within the story of his progenitor Cain, so making him a Sub within a pop-fiction version of Noah's narrative is only a minor shift in his Sub-alignment. 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. -- INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2.

In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2, I described how a particular stature-bearing icon, Robin the Boy Wonder, completed a phrase shift away from being an icon within a superordinate ensemble to being (in the identity of Nightwing) a stand-alone superordinate icon. Here I want to deal with a phase shift related to a subordinate icon graduating to a qualified superordinate status-- qualified, because the icon remains stature-dependent upon the icon from which she was derived.

For most of her existence, Lois Lane was a part of Superman's subordinate ensemble. Starting in SUPERMAN #28 (1944), the girl reporter got a backup series in that title for about a year. Now, for the length of time that said series existed, Lois Lane was the superordinate icon, while Clark Kent/Superman, whenever he appeared, became a subordinate icon. But for Superman that was a very qualified status, since Lois's popularity was contingent upon that of Superman. 

Now, in the essay referenced in the quote above, I went on to describe how the "spin-off" Batgirl functioned as a subordinate icon within the Batman serials up until the point that she graduated to her own serial. However, BECAUSE Batgirl appeared to be fast-tracked to getting her own series within about five years of her debut, she was also a proto-crossover. Lois by contrast was a pure subordinate icon, and neither her 1944 serial nor the Silver Age one that lasted for about thirteen years-- SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE-- really did anything to lesson her standing as what I've labeled a "Charisma Dominant Sub." My same verdict holds even given the existence of a couple of television shows in which Lois and Superman were arguably equal Prime types, those being LOIS AND CLARK and SUPERMAN AND LOIS.   

Now, all the serials in which Lois is a stature-dependent Prime and Superman is her Sub do not count as crossovers, the way all of Batgirl's appearances in BATMAN serials do hold that status, simply because Batgirl became a "Stature Dominant Prime." By the same token, Superman does not have any crossover-status with Lois in her own serials, in the way that he does when he teams with Batman in the WORLD'S FINEST feature. The "phase shift" associated with a support-icon being spun off in a separate feature, but a feature that does NOT alter the overall status of the feature's star, is distinct from the one in which such an alteration of status does take place. For this, the example of Robin-turned-Nightwing is instructive, because once Nightwing is independent of Batman he's no longer automatically aligned with the Bat-universe. One example I cited was that because Batman meets Ra's Al Ghul after discontinuing his partnership with Dick Grayson, Ra's Al Ghul does not belong to the Grayson-verse.

Now, in the Silver Age LOIS LANE feature, unlike the short-lived Golden Age one, the Prime star sometimes met other icons who belonged to Superman's Sub-cosmos, such as Lex Luthor. Everything in Superman's cosmos is also in the dependent cosmos of the girl reporter, so Luthor and other Super-villains have no crossover value, as they would if they interacted with Batman under the WOR LD'S FINEST umbrella. 

Lana Lang presents a slight anomaly, because, by the rules I set up in Part 2 of this series, Lana belongs to the SUPERBOY cosmos, not to that of SUPERMAN, because the personas are different even though they belong to the same person at different ages. Further, at the time that Lana made adult appearances in LOIS LANE, she also continued to appear as her juvenile self in the SUPERBOY title. Lana Lang remains a "Charisma Dominant Sub" in the SUPERBOY feature, but though she's also a Sub in LOIS LANE, she's also not subsumed by her juvenile persona any more than Superboy is subsumed by Superman. My solution to this anomaly is to say that when Adult Lana starts appearing in LOIS LANE (in 1957's SHOWCASE #9, which led to the ongoing LOIS series), Superboy's Girlfriend generates a one-time-only crossover-vibe, as she undergoes a phase shift from one type of Sub-persona to another. This is loosely paralleled by the rule I set up for the third season of the 1966 BATMAN series, in which Batgirl joined the Bat-team as a permanent member (in contrast to her comic-book history). In that case, only Batgirl's first episode in the Bat-series generated a crossover-vibe.  

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I cited my definition for "phase shift:"

"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.

 Simply as a random choice I cited one of the phase shifts I had identified in a recent essay, but as I said at the essay's conclusion, I could have chosen many others.

My first *sustained* investigations into "crossover-ology" began with Part 1 of the series A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS. The examples in the essay concerned how icons with stature, such as Robin Hood and Fu Manchu shifted into icons of charisma when they were "demoted" into subordinate icons, which was the opposite type of shift discussed in PHASED PART 1. In this essay, I'll deal with a different type of phase shift.

GLAD TO MEET YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN in June 2023 introduced the overall concept of iconic bonding. For my example of this literary process, I drew distinctions between the status of Batman and Robin during the thirty years that they were a bonded ensemble, and all the years afterward, when Robin ceased to be Batman's partner. According to some critical evaluations, DC ended the partnership for purely pecuniary reasons. Following the cancellation of the BATMAN teleseries in 1968, sales for BATMAN comics fell precipitously, and DC decided that the presence of Robin in the series reinforced the feature's association with the now unpopular concept of camp. For the first time Robin had solo adventures of his own that were not implicated with the Batman-and-Robin series, as well as entering into ensembles with both Batgirl and the 1970s incarnation of the Teen Titans. (The character had also been with the 1960s incarnation of that super-group, but that iconic bond had been qualitatively secondary to the better-known Batman-and-Robin ensemble.) 

All of the 1970s alterations to Robin's status should be viewed as a minor phase shift, akin to any other time a character in an ongoing partnership gets a "spin-off." However, a different flavor of phase shift transpires in TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS #44 (1984), which I previously reviewed here as part of the JUDAS CONTRACT continuity. For four years Robin had remained in the ensemble of the successful 1980s TITANS franchise, which had become his dominant source of ongoing stature.

 During that time DC also reversed its course on having a Robin in the BATMAN franchise, and since Dick Grayson already had a successful berth in TITANS, the company chose to bring forth a new Robin, Jason Todd, introduced about a year before in BATMAN #357. For whatever reasons, it took roughly a year for DC staff to decide that Dick Grayson would divest himself of the Robin identity for good, and take on a new superhero name, Nightwing.

This is a phase shift of a different nature than the spin-off status of Solo-Robin. Over time DC raconteurs had to evolve a new literary identity for Dick Grayson As Nightwing, even though textually he was the exact same person as Dick Grayson As Robin. This type of phase shift relates not to stature or charisma, but to what I will call the "narrative texture" of a character; of the set of expectations that the audience brings to a given text, separating one persona assumed by Character A from another persona assumed by Character A. By this same logic, I deem DC's Superboy to be a distinct persona from DC's Superman-- but that's a discussion for another time.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHIP OF ISHTAR (1924), PT. 2

In my review of A. Merritt's THE MOON POOL, I observed the following of his highly lapidary prose style:

Author Merritt takes great pleasure in describing the interfusion of loveliness and wickedness, of heaven and hell, and in future novels he develops this trope to greater effect. 

SHIP OF ISHTAR is in my mind one of those more accomplished later novels, though the titular ship itself might seem to reject any such fusions, given that the ship is divided into a white-colored half devoted to Ishtar, Goddess of Love, and a black-hued half devoted to Nergal, God of Death. Furthermore, early in the novel the human representative of Ishtar on said ship, the priestess Sharane, explicitly lays down a rather Manichean separation between Love and Death that sounds more Christian than Babylonian to my ears.

"Between Ishtar and Nergal is and ever must be unending hatred and strife. For Ishtar is the Bestower of Life and Nergal is Taker of Life; she is the Lover of Good and he is the Lover of Evil. And how shall ever Heaven and Hell be linked; or life and death, or good and evil?"

That said, Sharane, relating to protagonist John Kenton the story of the Ship's creation, doesn't necessarily speak for her creator. It's true that unending strife rules the Ship, with Sharane and her fellow priestesses constantly warding off the mystical attacks of Klaneth and his priests of Nergal. And despite the opposition of male and female forces, Klaneth has no designs on Sharane. Most villains from similar adventure-romances were always the hero's competition for the girl, but Klaneth just wants Sharane dead. The two of them seem to validate the opposition of the gods they represent, deities who can enter the bodies of their servants at will, like the orisha-spirits of voodoo.

However, the Ship comes about because of a love that transgresses the normal boundaries between religious spheres. In ancient Babylon the Ishtar-priestess Zarpanit falls in love with the Nergal-priest Alasu, and the two begin meeting clandestinely. The mortals are about to consummate their love when, quixotically enough, both of their deities choose to possess their votaries at the same moment. Merritt is decorous in having Sharane claim that the two mortals did not quite "meet," which would have had the effect of bringing about a cosmic sex-act between two opposed forces. (It would have also been a traducement of Babylonian marital law, because in Merritt's world Ishtar is the wife of the war-god Bel.) 

The Ship is created as a punishment for the rebellious votaries, in that Zarpanit and her retinue-- including Sharane-- must occupy one half of the ship while Alasu and his retinue-- including Klaneth-- must remain on the other side. However, Zarpanit and Alasu cross the forbidden barrier and die together. Thus Sharane and Klaneth inherit the punishment of the two dead lovers, though this ends up giving them an otherworldly immortality, as they and all in their contact remain preserved while the Babylon of history perishes.

Into this domain of sexual brinkmanship, modern-day Kenton enters. Yet he doesn't precisely get the same friendly welcome from the leading lady as Burroughs' heroes usually receive. Having heard her story, Kenton tells Sharane that Babylon is long gone. Sharane, who has already experienced an instant attraction for the American, becomes angry at his claim that she's a spectre who's outlived her culture. She has her warrior-maidens overwhelm Kenton and thrust him over the Nergal-side of the ship. Klaneth consigns Kenton to the oar-locks, ensuring that Klaneth will rue the day he did so. However, Kenton is more than a little wroth with Sharane as well, particularly when she and one of her maidens venture close enough to taunt the imprisoned oarsman.

"Satalu," [Sharane] murmured, "would you not think the sight of me would awaken even a slave? That any slave, so he were young and strong, would break his chains-- for me?"

I doubt any Burroughs heroines ever talked this way. Sharane is mocking Kenton for his enslavement, but at the same time she's daring him to use his masculine might to break free, claiming that even "any slave" would willingly break his bonds if tempted by her feminine charms. On some level she wants him to break free and ravish her, because ravishment is the proof of vital male energy. She pretends to be offended when Kenton responds that when he takes over the ship, he's also going to take her. But all these sallies are rough love-talk, not any sort of literal promise of rapine.

Kenton takes over the Ship of Ishtar and rids it of all other males except those in his retinue. However, the death-god Nergal hurls his own rejoinder, manifesting warriors to attack Kenton's forces (all before he takes Sharane, though he does catch her unaware in her cabin and bind her). But Ishtar sends her own female emissaries, not to fight the Nergal-men, but to overwhelm them with love. Both groups of magical minions dissolve in an act of cosmic sex, and immediately after, Sharane is suddenly converted to instant love of Kenton's masterful ways. The two retire to a cabin-- not without some more rough talk from Kenton-- and Merritt tells us that the goddess sends down her sacred doves to consecrate this "wedding" of Babylonian priestess and American archaeologist.

The latter part of the book throws another image of sexual duplication into the mix. Sharane, captured by Klaneth's forces, is taken to Emaktila, another still-living part of Old Babylon. Almost all of the action on this island takes place in the Temple of Seven Zones, which like the Ship is a shrine dedicated to more than one god-- in fact, to all seven of Babylon's planetary deities. 

Now at the Temple Merritt plays up a detail about Sharane: that she's actually a priestess of Bel, not of his wife Ishtar, and this opens her to a new kind of peril. Even though Sharane has obviously had sex with Kenton, she stands in danger of having sex with another man-- because Shalamu, the priest of Bel, is a twin for Kenton. Shalamu takes over the role scorned by Klaneth: that of the rotter who's willing to rape a woman for sheer lust. Kenton invades the temple to save Sharane, and the two men fight. Ironically, Shalamu is doomed not by Kenton but by a female dancer, Narada, who loves the Bel-priest and stabs him by mistake. Sharane then kills Narada, so that the "good couple" wins out over "the bad couple."

Nergal and Ishtar have a mystical conflict toward the novel's end, but for the most part their opposition becomes less important for most of the latter half of the story. In a larger symbolic sense, Bel and Nergal are equivalent menaces, in that the union of the good couple is threatened by the human representatives of both male gods. In contrast, Ishtar ends up being beneficent to the good couple, which follows from her consecration of their unofficial marriage.

Without going into too much detail, suffice to say that the Babylonian fantasy-world does not endure, and all of its occupants, including the one alien to that domain, meet their doom as well. Merritt presents this doleful demise with an upbeat note, implying that Kenton and Sharane will be united in some Babylonian heaven. I consider SHIP to be Merritt's strongest novel for two reasons. For one, he weaves a strong sexual myth out of his take on ancient pagan beliefs. And for two, Merritt takes all the old gods seriously, rather than depicting them as too many authors of the time did: as super-scientific entities from Atlantis or the planet Pluto. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHIP OF ISHTAR (1924), PT. 1

 THE SHIP OF ISHTAR was the third of eight metaphenomenal novels which journalist Abraham Merritt wrote between 1919 and 1934. I think it fair to say that none of Merrit's essays, poems or short stories have enjoyed any repute with either his contemporaries or later generations it's all about the novels, or the three movies adapted from the books. 

SHIP is the only Merritt novel that I categorize as a "magical fantasy," specifically the subtype described in this essay by the "portal into another world" category, where a character (or characters) will pass out of the mundane world into a fantasy-realm, spending nearly the whole narrative in the otherverse. SHIP's hero, archaeologist John Kenton, is an extreme example of such a protagonist. He has no background aside from his profession and one very minor reference to his Irish-American heritage. Kenton encounters the fantasy-portal in a room at his private residence, and he returns to that very room only for brief transitions out of the fantasy-verse, but never goes anywhere else in the "real world" for the entirety of the book.

Kenton receives a Babylonian artifact from an archaeological colleague, a stone block. When Kenton taps the block with a hammer, it splits apart, and inside is a highly detailed crystal carving of a ship at sea. As Kenton studies the carving, he physically transitions to the fantasy-world represented by the carving, a world where Babylonian gods and magic still exist, even though the Babylonian civilization has fallen to dust in Kenton's time. 

I'll note in passing that while the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books in 1912 made it sound as if hero John Carter's spirit might have left his mundane body to manifest on Mars, Kenton's real body definitely makes the journey. Whenever he returns to his room in the real world, he retains any changes that occurred to his form in the Babylon-verse, such as physical wounds.

Like most Burroughs books, Merritt's novels are usually about heroes undertaking grand adventures for the sake of winning a beautiful woman. Unlike most Burroughs works, SHIP manages to make the quest for romance serve a deep metaphysical myth-thread-- one complicated enough that it will require a separate post to explore. 

Sticking to the plot only then, Kenton finds himself on a ship that might be called a "mobile temple," and one devoted to two warring deities. (This might be an extension of a frequently used trope in Burroughs; that of warring sister-cities.) Kenton's romantic interest, beauteous Sharane, rules over the light-hued half of the ship, which is dedicated to Ishtar, Goddess of Love, and in this she's served by a small coterie of warrior-maidens. The black-hued half of the ship is ruled by Nergal, Babylonian God of Death, and his servants are an ugly gang of black-robed monks, ruled by their leader Klaneth. Three good males-- a Persian, a Norseman and a Ninevite-- serve as unwilling bondsmen to Klaneth, so inevitably they end up being Kenton's allies in his quest to defeat the death-god's servant and to woo the servant of the love-goddess.

Part 2 will go into the metaphysical setup as to why the bisected temple-ship exists at all. Here I'll confine myself to the base action. After being cruelly treated by Klaneth, Kenton leads a rebellion with his allies, tosses Klaneth and his men off the ship, and wins Sharane. However, the Nergal-priest survives being deep-sixed, possibly thanks to his deity. He comes back to attack the Ishtar-ship with a Babylonian bireme, presumably taken from the only other location in this fantasy-world, the sorcerers' isle Emaktila. Kenton happens to get spirited back to his own world by chance while the attack transpires. When he returns to the ship, he learns that Klaneth's forces have abducted Sharane and have taken her back to Emaktila to suffer some dire fate. No one will be surprised that the rest of the story concerns how Kenton and his friends launch a rescue mission. This naturally involve san encounter not only with a Babylonian society-- apparently preserved in its otherworld by the gods-- but also the other five deities in Babylon's septet of planetary rulers.

I'll pass over the fates of Kenton and Sharane, because those tie into the deeper metaphysical myth of the novel, which I tend to codify as "cosmic sex," and which I'll detail further in Part 2. I think anyone can enjoy SHIP just as a kinetic adventure story, though Merritt's prose won't be for all tastes. I find him able to paint enchanting visual pictures better than the majority of prose writers, but I imagine a lot of modern readers would find Merritt a little too rococo.